In my years of generating content, building communities and corporate storytelling, I’ve worked with companies large and small on various projects, campaigns and initiatives.

One common trait I’ve seen repeated over and over again is a lack of reporting and constructive learnings shared within organizations.

I’m writing this post in hopes to start a dialogue with you, Mr. or Ms. Digital Marketer, so we can all start or improve our reporting processes together.

Let’s talk about the importance of proper planning and reporting, shall we?

Properly plan and set targets early on

A social project or campaign starts (or should!) in alignment with a business goal or company’s overall needs.

Then, the digital marketers are called in to craft a campaign accordingly. This is where reporting starts! Be sure that even at the projects’ inception, your efforts closely align to the business goals. Start by setting two primary goals and actionable tactics that will be indicators of success to those goals.

For example, if the goal is to “grow our Twitter following”, set a target early on that’s achievable, measurable and realistic.

Is a 20% growth in following satisfactory or is 50% more in line with the stakeholder’s expectations?

The benefits of reporting and surfacing conclusion collectively

In most cases, not carrying out proper reporting and post mortem activities isn’t malicious. It’s because marketing departments are busy and when one project closes, we begin executing on the next project.

However, I feel a project isn’t truly complete until reporting and lessons learned have been discussed. Reporting should *never* be an afterthought, it should be part of a project’s flow and timeline.

Build transparency and trust

When you build a report that is highlights successes, surfaces failures and explains the reasons why you’ll do it differently next time, you build trust through the exercise of being transparent.

Reports are fantastic avenues for telling stakeholders about a project’s success, what worked and why it worked. These wins should be mentioned in an executive summary and highlighted in detail throughout a report.

But here’s a challenge: treat a failure of “need to improve upon” factor with the same rigor. Highlight a “lesson learned” by explaining the factors of why a goal wasn’t met and then reflect on how you’ll change your approach for success next time.

Proper reporting helps repeat mistakes

This likely goes without saying, but proper reporting and distributing these reports will help your project team or campaign staff from making repeat mistakes. It’s fine to have a slip-up or to miss a target. Make the mistake a success by openly discussing it and learning from the mistake!

The only crime is repeating the mistake or withholding information.

Reporting helps surface and share successes unseen before

Worried that sharing failures and lessons learned might be a negative thing? Here’s a secret: the opposite might come true! By building and sharing reports (even in draft) you’ll discover wins and successes in the project that weren’t even on your radar before.

While you were busy carrying our your portion of the project and taking tabs on the occurrences from your perspective, other project members, perhaps in another department likely exceeded their target or made a slamdunk, figuratively.

When reporting, poll all participants and share your draft reports to gather intel form all sides.

The best campaign reports are composed of data that paint a story that management can use to draw conclusions. When these conclusions are applied to future efforts, a magical thing happens! They allow a department, project team or leader to predict what will work well next time.

So, ensure that a next time will happen by building amazing reports.

To be sure your reports are amazing, you need the proper tool. Sysomos MAP and Sysomos Heartbeat enables practitioners and decision makers to have the proper data and context into that data to make decisions.

Every day, we get to see our amazing clients use Sysomos in amazing ways. But no matter how smart our clients are (and they’re pretty smart), not everyone can possibly know everything. Especially with software like ours that’s always full of fun surprises for our clients.

While you can’t know everything, we thought it would be great to help our clients get a bit better at their jobs. So we decided to ask our team of Social Media Specialists “what amazing thing in Sysomos do you think too many clients are missing out on?”

Bookmarks in Heartbeat can be customized to be accessible to only 1 user or a group of users, as opposed to all users. This is an excellent time saving tool and a way for team members to make sure they are looking at the exact same filter set when collaborating in Heartbeat. Also, don’t forget to give your bookmarks names that are easy for everyone that sees them to understand what they’re looking at.

Alex DiRenzo, Agency Social Media Specialist – Learn More About The People Talking About Your Brand

A lot of clients use the Followers Bio Word Cloud to learn more about their Twitter followers, but what about all the people that mention their brand that aren’t following? This is where CSV export files can be utilized – Write a simple brand mentions query. Export the Twitter results. In the CSV file there will be a bio column. Copy the whole column into word or another excel sheet and de-duplicate the list so that no users bio is repeating itself. Paste the duplicate free results into any available online word cloud generator. Voila – you have a word cloud of all the ways those who mentioned your brand are self identifying in their Twitter bio. The largest words will be the most commonly occurring. Note you may want to remove any words from the word cloud that you may consider fluff – i.e. love, Twitter, I, work, live, etc. Look no further than your own twitter bio to see how many personal details you’ve revealed in a short space to see how this can be valuable.

Lots of people use the compare tab in MAP to compare themselves to their competitors over a common timeline and filter set. But removing the common filter gives you the ability to compare so much more. You could compare the same query or hashtag filtered by different geographies, demographics or timelines. It’s really useful.

One thing I think more clients can take advantage of is the fact that they can create Boolean queries in their own Heartbeat allowing them to do an ad-hoc search amongst all the mentions in their Heartbeat account (up to 30K mentions).

See how a specific twitter community found in our Communities tool is talking about a certain topic/brand/product and who this community is by adding them to a Media Set. Drill down their conversations by jumping into Text Analytics, Demographics and Top Influencers.

Want even more insight? Try running a blank query search and go through the analytics again to find out if this community has any other commonalities outside of your original search topic. This can help your brand provide more valuable and relatable content to a specific audience.

If you need any help implementing or want to learn more about any of the tips above, feel free to reach out to your dedicated Sysomos Social Media Specialist.

If you ever want to learn more cool Sysomos tips and tricks, make sure you check our great Sysomos Support Portal.

And if you’re not already a Sysomos client, but are interested in learning how you can become one and do some of the cool things mentioned above, feel free to reach out and request a demo of our software.

Creating content isn’t an easy job. Believe me, I know because it’s a big part of my role here at Sysomos. Luckily, I don’t have to do it all by myself because I’m surrounded by a ton of smart people both inside and outside our company and make sure I use their smarts whenever possible.

I’m not alone in this content creation situation. Everyone knows just how important it is to have great content, especially in the online world, these days. But don’t worry, no matter what size your company is, you’re not alone either.

Here are a few ways that you can enlist others’ help in creating content for your brand:

Ask the amazing people you work with

I’m lucky to work with a ton of really smart and creative people. From our product group that help to make Sysomos software great or our account team who help to make sure our clients have the best experience possible with us. They’re all very smart and all have their own areas of expertise in their fields that can benefit our clients and customers. That’s why I it make a consistent practice to call upon their help in content creation.

Whether you send out a company wide email or you make a posting looking for some assistance on your company intranet, there’s a good chance people in your company will be more than willing to help. People like to help, especially if they get some sort of recognition for it or will benefit from it. The problem is most people in marketing or communications don’t go outside of their departments for help, but you’d be surprised what you’ll find when you do.

Find customers/superfans and ask them to contribute

You know who else loves to help when they can? Your customers and superfans.

These are going to be the people who use and love your product. They’re probably doing amazing things with it and have perspectives that are different than yours. Even just talking to some of these people will give you new and great ideas for content or, at least, how you can shape some of your future content.

Sometimes, your customers or superfans may even want to get in on the content creation process. This could be in the form of a case study (highlighting how they are using your product/service) to a testimonial (singing your praise) to something else that’s completely different. Don’t be afraid to get creative and try new ideas from others, you might get amazing results from it.

For example, we love when clients do cool and interesting things with our Sysomos software. It gives us a chance to highlight interesting ways people are using our software, plus they help us to create the content to highlight it. One of my favorite examples in the time I’ve been here was a few Christmases ago when Canadian Tire and their agency used Sysomos to light up a Christmas Tree based on holiday cheer being spread through social media. This was a great way for them to get extra exposure for their project, it gave us something cool to write about and it was something interesting that we wouldn’t have thought to do on our own.

Knowing who your customers are to hit up for some help in creating content is easy (and if you don’t know, again, ask around your company and people will know). But what about finding your superfans? If you don’t already know who they are, you can use a social intelligence tool, like Sysomos, to search them out. You can do a search for your brand or product name in a tool like Sysomos MAPand then look up who are the people that mention it the most. Like this example below, we did a quick search and were able to determine the people that mention they love their Fitbitsa lot on Twitter which means they are likely superfans who may want to help the brand if they contacted them.

Can’t write? No problem. There’s other ways these people can help.

Once you’ve determined some people to enlist in your quest for creating more content, you’re bound to hear the common response, “I’m not a good writer” at least a few times. But don’t let that discourage you. Writing is only part of the content creation process. There’s a lot of ways these “non-writers” can still help.

A lot of people think that they can’t write, but they’d be surprised what happens when they actually try. Give them a little bit of encouragement to try and, as a writer yourself, offer to help them fix it up once they’ve put together a first draft.

If they’re really against writing, don’t worry, there’s a ton of other ways you could work with these people to get them to help you produce content. Here’s just a few examples:

Make a video of them talking about a topic (a lot of people find it easier to talk about something than to write about it)

Do a Q&A session (either written, transcribed or on video)

Ask your customers what their biggest questions are and create content that answers those questions

Get someone to tell you about a process and then transcribe that process into an easy to follow infographic

Do a picture heavy editorial and ask people to submit their own photos around an event or topic

Ask them to tell you a story and then transcribe it or record it and turn it into a visually appealing video

Get them to create a bulleted list (this helps them get away from thinking they need to write out proper paragraphs of points)

Make an audio recording that an be easily shared

That list could go on and on, but we think you get the point of how many different ways there are for these “non-writers” to still help you create great content.

Now stop worrying about all that content you thought you had to create on your own and go out there and enlist some help. Everyone’s an expert on something. Use their expertise.

It’s such an exciting time to be at Sysomos. After announcing our independence in February, we’ve fast-tracked innovation like no other time in our history.

Today we’re happy to announce our most recent executive level hires that will help us across our organization to deliver innovative, data-science solutions for our current and future client base.

Our latest executive hires were hand-picked by CEO Lindsay Sparks and we couldn’t be more excited to welcome them into the organization!

Omer Aziz, Senior Vice President of Human Resources

Omer brings more than 25 years of experience working in global telecommunication and high tech companies. Aziz has a combined background in engineering and HR, both in education and experience. Aziz recently completed an assignment in the UK as the International Head of HR for BlackBerry. Before that he held various senior roles in HR and Operations at BlackBerry, Nortel and Bell Canada.

Edward Byon, Chief Financial Officer

With over 15 years of financial, accounting and management experience, Edward previously worked as a consultant for large organizations including Tyco Integrated Securities and Siemens. Byon also held senior finance positions for Ruggedcom Inc. and Sun Microsystems, and was instrumental to the acquisition and integration work by Siemens and Oracle, respectively.

Eric Kafka, Vice President, Corporate Development

Eric joins Sysomos from OMERS Private Equity, where he spent a significant amount of his time in the software space and worked on numerous transactions, including both acquisitions and divestitures. Eric started his career with Scotiabank Global Banking and Markets in the Mergers and Acquisitions Group, where he worked on a number of M&A transactions across a diversified group of industries.

Timothy Torres, Senior Vice President of Infrastructure

Tim brings nearly three decades of experience in information technology to the Sysomos team, most recently from NICE Systems, where he was vice president of global hosting operations. He has a deep understanding of the intricacies involved in building the infrastructure required to support the vast amounts of data pulsing through the Sysomos platform.

Mark Young, Chief Marketing Officer

Mark comes to Sysomos from Clear Channel, where he served as the executive vice president of marketing solutions, and before that he spent fifteen years at Microsoft as general manager. Throughout his more than twenty year career, Young has overseen product development, program management, business modeling, marketing, brand building, and finance for consumer products and services, as well as for business-to-business products and services, and partner management.

In the month of June, our theme has been social intelligence-powered content production and related topics for content marketers. Today we’re going to discuss ways to help amplify your content using relationships with influencers.

Let’s preface this conversation with a definition of ‘influencer’, which has become a widely used term in 2015.

An influencer is any person who has developed an engaged audience with his/her community. An influencer is usually an expert in a field such as photography, marketing, couponing or even fashion. Through their social media activity on channels such as YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter or other platform, they’ve amassed a following who admires the talents of that influencer and takes their opinions to heart.

These influencers are constantly looking for news and articles to possibly use in their outgoing communications on their social channels.

Here, content marketers, is where the opportunity lies.

Using social intelligence and good old fashioned people skills, we can find, approach and seed content to influencers for amplification.

How do I start?

If you’re considering an influencer content seeding plan, you and your organization needs to begin by generating visually interesting or intellectually stimulating content that the influencer and their community would find to be interesting and sharable.

Let’s begin this exploration with an applied example: Years ago, through my writing on my personal blog and a well-known tech blog I used to write for, I was an influencer for Nokia. The company saw me as an expert in mobile phones/technologies and liked my opinions. Therefore, they gave me the opportunity to trial phones, come to corporate events and get to know various experts inside the company.

This example is a good illustration of a healthy influencer relationship. Nokia received product opinions and earned media amongst my social posts and those of the other influencers in the program and I received early access to mobile handsets and was able to be the first online with opinions about Nokia phones, software and trends.

Generate a win-win

Depending on your industry vertical or viewpoint, your organization has a lot to offer influencers. But, why should the influencer reply to your email and start a relationship around your product or service?

At this point you might be thinking that the influencer will gain exposure and therefore he/she should reply to the ask. But I can tell you firsthand, there are too many requests being made to influencers and you need to dig deeper.

Bring them in to the product formation. Smart companies approach influencers for their expert opinions in addition to access to the influencers’ audience. Reach out to influencers on Twitter or other channels and immediately offer to bring them into your process. Invite them to meet your team. Meet with them and ask for their opinion. Even if your legal department asks for an NDA, the feedback and collaboration earned from this type of relationship is invaluable.

Tailor the content in cooperation with the influencer. Say for example you’re at a company that sells a new type of healthy greek yogurt and you want to spread the word amongst fitness and health food influencers. Rather than simply developing a blog post or infographic and emailing 100 influencers with a request to share the content on their channels, instead email 10 of the top influencers and ask them what type of visual assets their audience would eat up.

I can guarantee that for some content producers, they have an idea for an infographic, but they don’t have a designer to help develop it and make it happen. Your marketing department does (if not, get one!) and therefore you can co-create the content. The brand will get higher engagement from the influencer and wider spread if this approach is taken.

Feature the influencer in the campaign. Let’s go back to the yogurt example above. If you’re looking to use an influencer’s celebrity status, offer to feature them in the campaign! This can take place in the form of images featuring them as a model, an expose on the influencer’s story or public speaking appearances featuring the influencer as a key participant. Note: some influencers will likely desire a payment for this type of endorsement so be ready to respond to this ask in your project planning.

How do I find these influencers?

Finding influencers can be difficult. Using Twitter search or other engines leads to many false leads and wasted time. This is where Sysomos can help you. Using our Sysomos MAP tool, we make finding influencers easy.

Influencer Bio Search

We’re amongst the only tools online that actually allows you to search Twitter bios. You see, many times, influencers put titles into their Twitter bio that, when keyed in to, yield fantastic insights into what drives and motivates them.

For example, a friend of mine, Shannon Dougherty, is a fitness expert, entrepreneur and wellness influencer. Check out her Twitter profile below:

So, say you’re looking for someone who might find your yogurt to be beneficial to their audience, check out Sysomos MAP and click on the Influencer Bio Search.

Check out Communities in Sysomos

Sure finding individuals with a voice and high influencer score is great. But let’s dig deeper and see who is actually a community catalyst. Who influencers the influencers? Check out the Communities tab inside MAP to see just that:

Work with us

Looking for more information on how influencer marketing is done with Sysomos? Contact us today!

The really great thing about really great content is that it’s timeless. This means that if you have produced a well performed piece of content, be it a blog post, a video, an infographic, or anything else, just sharing it once means you’re not sharing it nearly enough.

Great content that has a long shelf life should be, and needs to be, shared more often so that you’re not missing out on connecting it to the people that want or need it and missed it the first time around. But how do you know what content should be shared again? And once you know that, how do you go about doing it? We have a couple pieces of advice for you on this today (or any day if you’re reading this when we’ve reshared it).

The process is actually quite simple and shouldn’t take you long at all do. It’s a simple three step process of:

Figuring out the best content to repurpose or reshare

Find the best way(s) to reuse that content

Find the best times to put that content back out into the world

Determine what content should be used over and over again

The first step when it comes to repurposing and reusing content is to determine which content is worthy. There’s several ways that you can do this. Of course, our favorite way comes from using social intelligence to determine what content your audience loved or what old content would be relevant for them again today.

Let’s start first with determining what content your audience loved the most. If you’re doing content right, you should have analytics around all of your content that you can go back and look at. If your content is a blog post, take a look at your Google Analytics (or whichever web analytics provider you use) and determine which post saw the most overall traffic. If your content is a video, you can also see this information directly from YouTube, Vimeo or any other video site you uploaded the content to. All your content should have some analytics attached to it so you could see how it performed. Seeing which content attracted the most eyeballs should give you a pretty good idea of which content pieces seem to be most interesting to your audience and even though they have the most views, there’s still a good chance that not everyone you’d have like to have seen it did. This means that this content is ripe for getting reshared with your audience.

Another way to determine which content of yours was most popular would be to use a tool, like our Sysomos software, to figure out what content was most popular in the social space. One way to go about doing this is to look back at which of your tweets linking to your content was shared most. Using a tool like Sysomos MAP and heading over to our our Most Retweeted section we can help to identify which tweets were passed along the most, which likely means that people liked them so much they were interested in sharing them with their networks. For example, @Pillsbury shares a lot of yummy recipes that you can make with their products. By doing a search for tweets with “recipe” we can determine which were the most popular ones in the past six months (or in whatever timeline you’d like to search in). If these recipes went over well the first time around, they’re likely to do the same if they get reshared again.

Figure out the best way to repurpose or re-share your content

Now that you’ve determined your content that’s worth putting out there again, it’s time to figure out how to best go about doing this.

In the example with @Pillsbury above, they could likely send out the exact same tweets again and get a great response on their second time around. In a lot of cases, you could probably do this as well. But what about if you could use that same content in a way that makes it look fresh and new?

If your audience also likes YouTube, take a popular blog post and find a way to change it into an entertaining video that can be easily watched and shared

If your audience is of a business nature, take that blog post of tips you made and make them into a presentation that you can share on SlideShare in an easy to digest format that can be easily shared or embedded in other places

You can even repurpose content in the same format, but just in a new package. Take your company’s YouTube videos and then find the best 6 second soundbites reshare those on Vine (or make them into 15 second clips and use them on Instagram)

(Note: that last idea was curtesy of @jj_stockwell during an #SMmeasure chat a few weeks back. Thanks Jason!)

@Sysomos Yes, we’ve used YouTube videos and chopped them into Vine content as well. Successful of a video depends the campaign #SMmeasure

If you consider yourself creative in anyway, the number of ways that you can change old content to make it look new and fresh again will be limitless.

Know when the best times to reuse all that content is

Now that we have all this content that we’re ready to put back out into the world, we need to figure out when the best time to do so is. In some cases, anytime might be a good time. For example, since this post isn’t associated with anything specifically timed to today, we could (and likely will) reshare this post whenever we feel like it. The content is timeless, so anytime we can get it in front of new eyeballs is likely a good time.

However, not all content is like this. Some content will do better at certain times or when they can be associated with other timely events. For example, one of @Pillsbury’s tweets we showed above was for a basketball themed recipe and was shared during March Madness. Well, just a few months after March Madness we found ourselves in the middle of the NBA Finals, which would be a great time to reshare that basketball themed recipe.

Things that gain the attention of a large section of the population aren’t just good times to bring up that old content. It’s also important to remember to focus on things that are timely and specific to just your audience. Keep an eye on what your top community members or influencers are talking about in the present, which is very easy to do if you have them in a Sysomos media set. Do you have a piece of content that speaks to something they’re currently interested in? This would be the perfect time to repurpose or re-share it. For example. in a media set we have built around TV critics, we saw from our Buzzgraph that they seem to be talking a lot about the season finale of Game of Thrones in the past 7 days. If we were in the entertainment business, we could take this a cue that people interested in entertainment and TV are also likely talking about this and now would be a great time to reuse some of our Game of Thrones content that we already have ready as the topic is hot at the moment.

Good content is always going to be good content and there will usually be a time and place when you can use it again. So, instead of constantly straining to keep coming up with fresh new content, don’t forget to think about all the ways that you can reuse and repurpose all of that great content you already have.

If you want to learn more about how social intelligence can help guide you on how and when to reuse your content, reach out to us and request a demo of Sysomos.

Yesterday at Social Media Week LA (#SMWLA) we had the distinct honor of presenting to a packed room of eager social media folks on how they can use social intelligence to make their businesses better.

Our very own Jason Harris, Nicolette Martin and Josh Graham spoke to an attentive audience about the theory of what social intelligence is (which we’ve covered here on the blog many times before) and, more importantly, how companies can apply it to their everyday work, supported with actual use cases from some of our amazing Sysomos clients.

In the presentation our team covered why social listening is important, but also why companies need to move past just listening. Turning that listening into true social intelligence is what will help companies to better understand their audiences and customers and, in turn, make overall better decisions that will make their business better.

Some of the topics covered in this presentation include using social intelligence to:

Benchmark

Take the guess work out of what your company is doing by supporting decisions with actual facts and stats

Guiding merchandising decisions

Crisis communication

Influencer marketing

And, of course, keeping your customers happy

Each of these topics is backed up with specific use cases of how actual companies were able to do these things using Sysomos software.

We invite you to view the presentation for yourself in the SlideShare below:

If you’d like to learn more about how you can put social intelligence to work for your company, we’d love to speak with you. Feel free to request a demo of our Sysomos software and we’d be more than happy to teach you more.

During the week of June 8-12, Team Sysomos is traveling to beautiful West Los Angeles to participate in the learnings, explorations and connections to be made at Social Media Week LA. We’ve been involved with Social Media Week events in the past but this time, we’re going all in with two speaking opportunities, a booth to meet our current and yet-to-be discovered friends and much, much more.

Social Media Week is a unique event, offering fascinating keynotes, resourceful masterclasses and plenty of 1:1 networking to ensure you leave with plenty of learnings and new connections to put to work in your life as a digital marketer. SMW LA appeals to marketing staff and executives alike.

Come see us at our booth!

At Bergamot Station in Santa Monica at SMW LA headquarters, come see Sysomos at our booth. We’re going to have tables in case you want to set your stuff down and re-charge. We’ll also have a Tickr-powered monitor to show real-time #SMWLA conversation as it happens and of course you can see all the Sysomos products and get a demo.

Come find us in the main exhibitor tent area at SMW LA.

Sysomos presents

Sysomos will have two speaking engagements at SMW LA, including a stage presentation and a masterclass. Both presentations are on the topic of social intelligence. Our Chief Evangelist and SVP Marketing, Amber Naslund will give a keynote main-stage presentation on Thursday morning at 11:00 AM Pacific time. This session will be Livestreamed and we’ll update @Sysomos on Twitter with the proper link when it’s available.

Also, we’ll be facilitating a Masterclass on Wednesday afternoon at 3:30 PM. In this masterclass, I’ll be speaking with Nicolette Martin and Josh Graham, talking about the importance of social intelligence with applied case studies. Whether you use Sysomos or not, the Masterclass will equip you to go back to your work full of applied examples to learn from.

Follow along, no matter your location

As much as we’d love to see you next week in LA, if you can’t make it to Santa Monica, please follow along via social media. We’ll be updating the Sysomos Blog and our Twitter and Instagram feeds with images and goings-on while in LA.

When you’re responsible for shaping and executing your company’s content plan for social media, it’s easy to get distracted. As corporate content marketers, we’re constantly asked to “throw things up on the blog” or “post that image to Twitter and generate some leads”. Therefore, content plans can be cluttered and lack theme and direction.

But, let’s not throw our hands in the air, content marketers! There’s light at the end of the tunnel (and it’s not a train, promise)!

To help guide us in our content planning, let’s go back to basics and architect a calendar/strategy that aligns with organizational goals powered by social intelligence.

Go back to the corporate elevator pitch

The vast majority of messaging that goes out on corporate social channels need to be ‘on brand’ and ‘on message’. But constitutes ‘on brand’?

Consult your company’s high level marketing messages and goals. It it’s been so long that you can’t remember what these are, then remind yourself by asking. If the corporate goals are stale and out-dated, then rattle the CMO’s office for actionable messaging.

Within the Syosmos content team, we’re lucky that we have a transparent CEO and executive team that takes it upon themselves to make sure we have a corporate roadmap in place that enables us to develop marketing messaging (for all digital marketing channels, including social). If you don’t have this in your organization, speak up! Remember, the squeaky wheel gets the grease!

Use text analytics

When looking for new keywords to play off of in corporate social messaging, look at your analytics tools and specifically the text analytics capabilities. Within your analytics tool, check out word clouds and my favorite, Buzz Graphs. If you don’t have a BuzzGraph, then you need Sysomos.

BuzzGraphs are my favorite because it shows correlations between two or more terms on social media and shows what words are being used in conjunction with your specified terms.

So, let’s say you work for an elevator company. You might find that people like to complain about waiting in line for elevators, that Brits refer it to the lift and so on. In this case, craft some funny social messages/images around waiting in line.

Get funky and think outside the box!

Find your balance and enforce it

Because social media touches all facets of the business from marketing, customer service, support and more, it’s important to find a balance with your messaging.

As a content manager, decide how many posts on each channel are appropriate for your business. Then devise a formula to guide your content calendars.

For example, some companies employ this type of mix: 50% outbound marketing, 20% helpful tips, 20% curated content, 10% re-tweeting clients. With this type of formula, you’ll know exactly how many messages you have each week to devote to each category. Writing your outbound messages become easier when you have these mixes in mind.

Tonight is a big night if you’re a hockey fan. At 8pm(EST) the Stanley Cup finals start where we’ll see the Chicago Blackhawks face off against the Tampa Bay Lightning to see which team will take home The Cup this year.

Both teams have had an exciting season and an even more exciting post-season. In the last round of the division playoffs, both teams took their series to 7 games before winning their chance to play for the sacred Stanley Cup. And now that both the Blackhawks and the Lightning have made it to the finals, this series also promises to be a great one for the fans to watch.

Using our Sysomos MAP social intelligence software we looked for mentions of both the Chicago Blackhawks and Tampa Bay Lightning across social media from the beginning of the NHL 2014-15 season (which started on October 8, 2014) up to this morning. What we found was that the Blackhawks saw a lot more action on social channels than the Lightning. Looking across all social channels, we found that the Blackhawks were mentioned in 4,212,437 posts over the season. At the same time, the Lightning only received 1,579,467 mentions.

Looking at those mentions plotted out over time on our popularity chart, it actually seems like both teams mentions seemed to have followed the same pattern in terms of mentions. Both teams saw minor spikes and valleys over the course of the season and then much larger ones as they went into the playoffs. However, while their patterns look similar, you can still see that the Blackhawks saw much more action over all, showing that they seem to have a much more socially engaged fan base.

What was most interesting though, was that when we broke these mentions down to look at them by individual channels, there was a huge discrepancy. When we compared how each team fared across different channels we found that the Tampa Bay Lightning seemed to be getting mentioned more across blogs, forums and in online news articles. Usually by about 40,000 or more mentions. However, on Twitter, the Chicago Blackhawks were definitely more favored and received almost 3 million more mentions than the Lightning. This Twitter support for the Blackhawks was so large though, that it lead to them seeing way more mentions in the overall total above.

But mention numbers aren’t everything. We also have to look at the context of those mentions to really see how the Lightning and the Blackhawks are really being perceived in the world of social media. To do this, we explored the sentiment around each team. When we did this, the race got a whole lot closer.

We started with the sentiment around the Chicago Blackhawks. Here we found that they had an overall favorable rating of 81%. Overall mentions of the Blackhawks over the course of the season showed that 24% of those mentions were positive, while 19% were negative. On the other hand, the Tampa Bay Lightning had an over favourable rating of 79%, which came from seeing 26% of their mentions as positive and 19% being negative. A very close race.

Overall Sentiment for the Chicago Blackhawks

Overall Sentiment for the Tampa Bay Lightning

Looking at the stats above we’re going to make the official call as the Chicago Blackhawks being the fan favourite to take home the Stanley Cup this year. The Blackhawks seem to have way more mentions over the course of the season by fans and a slightly better favorable rating.

Of course, being a fan favorite doesn’t necessarily mean that one is a better team than the other when it comes down to actually playing, so we’ll just have to see who’s going to be the Stanley Cup Champion as the series plays out.